Lermontoff; little
tales of a heady and bewildering nature, interspersed with unusual
songs--Peacock was that writer's name; there was Borrow's "Lavengro";
an odd theme, purporting to be a translation of something, called a
"Ruba'iyat," which the Head said was a poem not yet come to its own;
there were hundreds of volumes of verse---Crashaw; Dryden; Alexander
Smith; L. E. L.; Lydia Sigourney; Fletcher and a purple island; Donne;
Marlowe's "Faust "; and--this made McTurk (to whom Beetle conveyed it)
sheer drunk for three days--Ossian; "The Earthly Paradise"; "Atalanta in
Calydon"; and Rossetti--to name only a few. Then the Head, drifting in
under pretense of playing censor to the paper, would read here a
verse and here another of these poets, opening up avenues. And, slow
breathing, with half-shut eyes above his cigar, would he speak of great
men living, and journals, long dead, founded in their riotous youth;
of years when all the planets were little new-lit stars trying to find
their places in the uncaring void, and he, the Head, knew them as young
men know one another. So the regular work went to the dogs, Beetle being
full of other matters and meters, hoarded in secret and only told to
McTurk of an afternoon, on the sands, walking high and disposedly round
the wreck of the Armada galleons, shouting and declaiming against the
long-ridged seas.

Thanks in large part to their house-master's experienced distrust, the
three for three consecutive terms had been passed over for promotion to
the rank of prefect--an office that went by merit, and carried with it
the honor of the ground-ash, and liberty, under restrictions, to use it.

"_But_," said Stalky, "come to think of it, we've done more giddy
jesting with the Sixth since we've been passed over than any one else in
the last seven years."

He touched his neck proudly. It was encircled by the stiffest of
stick-up collars, which custom decreed could be worn only by the Sixth.
And the Sixth saw those collars and said no word. "Pussy," Abanazar, or
Dick Four of a year ago would have seen them discarded in five minutes
or... But the Sixth of that term was made up mostly of young but
brilliantly clever boys, pets of the house-masters, too anxious for
their dignity to care to come to open odds with the resourceful three.
So they crammed their caps at the extreme back of their heads,
instead of a trifle over one eye as the Fifth should, and rejoiced
in patent-leather boots o